Legislative activism

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
August 23, 2010

FORMS of activism have definitely multiplied in trickier, more sinister ways these past years. The original form is obviously when a person just acts without much thinking. Even common sense is neglected, and the result can only be trouble.

Such attitude, unfortunately, can be infectious, taking advantage of people’s weaknesses, ignorance and confusion, and thus can be so generalized as to become part of a society’s culture, with structures to perpetuate it.

And thus, we can have such anomalies as workaholism or professionalitis, where action, work and profession become the be-all and end-all of life. They set aside time for prayer, family life and our other responsibilities.

But the root cause of activism is when we detach ourselves from our objective source of wisdom and truth, and this is nothing other than God. This sadly is becoming prevalent because of the increasingly secularized environment we are having these days.

Instead we depend on our own ideas, mesmerized by their borrowed brilliance and buoyed by our own pride and vanity. In short, we make ourselves our own God. This irregularity is reinforced by a badly understood doctrine of the separation of Church and state that many of us are suffering.

According to this understanding, the Church cannot say anything on state affairs. In a worse case, religion or anything that has to do with faith is automatically banned from making any influence on a country’s political life. And yet all sorts of ideologies are made to hold sway over the people.

With this frame of mind, we start to create a bubble, we start to live in a cocoon. Reality becomes man-made. We follow a logic that while accompanied by reason, is ultimately based on hot air. This is where we can talk about an activism that is driven by ideologies founded on reason alone without God.

Its allure derives from the immediate practicality it gives, the instant, short-term advantages and benefits it produces. But it’s notoriously shallow and short-sighted, and worse, it tends to be dressed in deceptive devices to attract attention.

Thus, in the recent past, we had this disturbing phenomenon of street rallies, where noise replaced thinking, slogans substituted arguments, and ideologies attacked faith and our faith-derived culture.

Its falsehood and inherent infirmity obviously cannot keep the craze long. In time, all the shouting and marching petered out. It had no genuine soul. It cannot go far in its dream.

And so, other forms of activism had been resorted. Lately, we had been “regaled” for a while by the news that an American judge did what was tantamount to a judicial activism. That’s when he overturned the results of a plebiscite that banned same-sex marriage in California.

In his view, there was no sufficient reason to ban gay unions. He had the pluck to insinuate that there was more than enough reason homosexual marriages were ok, were constitutional, if not were moral and natural.

It’s good that a court stopped his decision, at least for a while, from being implemented. We have to be ready for this kind of activism that tries to usurp the right of the majority of the people to be heard in their beliefs.

In our own country, we have another disturbing phenomenon that is emerging. We can call it legislative activism, because it involves lawmakers, our congressmen and congresswomen, who now want to redefine marriage according to ideological lines.

This time, they want marriage not to be a lifelong commitment but a renewable affair after every few years. This is really a wild idea that only shows what’s inside their mind and heart.

Marriage, by definition, is a lifelong commitment, because it involves everything of the parties concerned. We, as persons and especially if we are aware that we receive grace from God through the sacrament of marriage, are capable of such commitment.

I’m sure the proponents want to solve some screaming marital and family problems, but the proposed solution can open a Pandora’s box of many other worse problems. With such attitude, where the nature and sanctity of marriage are eroded, people would have more reason not to take it seriously.

Besides, the proposal to legalize “renewable” marriage goes with another on divorce. Actually these two are twin bastard children of a man-made understanding of marriage.